The ‘strangely curious career’ of Philiberta: a ‘lost’ New Zealand novel

Abstract

The section on the novel in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in Englis his aimed at being as comprehensive as possible. The ambition was to include all full-length fiction before 1890 and all serious' novels since then. It is, of course, an impossible aim, complicated by boundary problems (what is a serious' novel?) and by the lack of a fully inclusive bibliography (James Burns' New Zealand Novels and Novelists 1861-1979 does not even include all the New Zealand novels in the Turnbull and Hocken collections, and A.G. Bagnall's New Zealand National Bibliography to the Year 1960, although more complete, still omits some novels). A further complication, acknowledged in the Second Edition of the Oxford History (121), is the lack of any index of novels serialised in newspapers and magazines, many of which did not appear in book form (or appeared only in paperback editions which have totally disappeared). There are thus undoubtedly many New Zealand novels, especially nineteenth-century ones, that are not discussed in the Oxford History. This note examines one of these that has recently come to light (in George Griffiths' entry on the author in Southern People: A Dictionary of Otago and Southland Biography), Thorpe Talbot's Philiberta: A Novel, a copy of which is held in the Hocken Library.